The Technical Foundation for Our Website

By Nige on February 27, 2023 at 2:11 pm
Type: Post Category: Handover
Tags: Announcements | Website

Some residents may be interested to know more about how our website has been developed and how it will be run moving forward. This blog post is for you! Anyone not interested, can move along to the next blog post or a different page now!

We have summarised the Key Points for those who just want the headlines. For those that would like to read a little more, head to our In-Depth Analysis.

Key Points

• We have secured our domain name: dovecotedrayton.co.uk.
• Our website is based on the most popular hosting platform for content: WordPress.
• WordPress offers unlimited flexibility in terms of capabilities and content.
• We have branded email services with one generic email account.
• We have paid for hosting and email services until 2026.
• We expect this website will become the basis for the Management Company, once the handover is successfully completed.

In-Depth Analysis

Domain Name

• We lease our domain name, which we pay a small amount of money to renew every year.
• It gives us the ability to create a branded website and to brand our emails.
• Security is key and we have secured our website – you can see the padlock when browsing on our website.

WordPress

• We are renting a WordPress shared hosting platform through Hostinger. We have paid for hosting until 2026 and that gives us lots of flexibility in terms of scaling the platform to meet our requirements, at a relatively low cost.
• WordPress is the world’s most popular hosting platform for content. According to Wikipedia, WordPress is used by 42.8% of the top 10 million websites as of October 2021, so we have made a good choice.
• The WordPress shared hosting through Hostinger is amazingly fast considering it’s a Content Management System (CMS), where the content is dynamically created by editors. Currently we haven’t enabled caching either, so we are not going to struggling with a sluggish website!
• WordPress has all of the basic features that we need built in. For example, we can manage content dynamically – that means we can create pages, menus, blog posts and news whenever we want and from wherever we want. There’s even a mobile application available to allow us to create content when on the tube!
• WordPress also supports membership, which allows us to manage a restricted community, and provide controlled access to information which we do not want to be made publicly visible. E.g. minutes.
• WordPress supports the principles of themes and plugins. So themes allow us to quickly change the look and feel of the website and plugins allow us to make use of third-party functionality which can be “bolted-on” to WordPress.

Email

• We are renting email services from Hostinger as well. Again, we have paid for email services until 2026.
• Again, that keeps the cost down and allows us flexibility over the number of mailboxes we need.

Enhancements

• Depending on how handover progresses, we will need to enhance our website to support our requirements when we are in control of the Management Company. We will keep you up to date as to how things will change, once we understand next steps.